Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History

By Hugh F Kearney

What is the Irish nation? Who is included in it? Are its borders delimited by religion, ethnicity, language, or civic commitment? And how should we teach its history? These and other questions are carefully considered by distinguished historian Hugh F. Kearney in Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History.
The insightful essays collected here all circle around Ireland, with the first section attending to questions of nationalism and the second addressing pivotal moments in the history and historiography of the isle. Kearney contends that Ireland represents a striking example of the power of nationalism, which, while unique in many ways, provides an illuminating case study for students of the modern world. He goes on to elaborate his revisionist “four nations” approach to Irish history.
In the book, Kearney recounts his own development in the field and the key personalities, departments, and movements he encountered along the way. It is a unique portrait not only of a humane and sensitive historian, but of the historical profession (and the practice of history) in Britain, Ireland, and the United States from the 1940s to the late 20th century-at once public intellectual history and fascinating personal memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780814749302

Book preview

Preface:

On Being a Historian in Four Countries

In 1942 I had the good fortune to win a state scholarship worth £250 a year. It also covered university fees. Without the state scholarship I might have gone to Liverpool University; with it I was able to apply for admission to Cambridge University. Cambridge, like Oxford, was a collegiate university and in becoming an undergraduate I also had to choose a college. Quite by chance I became a member of Peterhouse, mainly because my history teacher Frank Grace had been a research student there in the 1920s. Peterhouse was also well known as the college of Herbert Butterfield, a former grammar schoolboy, whose book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) challenged the assumptions of the orthodox nationalist interpretation of English history. I had come across it at my own grammar school. Peterhouse had earned a reputation as a college in which history had been taken seriously since the days of Adolphus Ward, master of the College from 1900 to 1924. One of the editors of the Cambridge Modern History, Harold Temperley, a leading diplomatic historian, had been a fellow. It was thus not surprising that it should be my choice of college.

History teaching at Cambridge revolved around lectures organized on a university basis and tutorials centered on the college. We attended most lectures out of a sense of duty but there are some which I still recall with pleasure, in particular those by Michael Oakeshott on political thought and by Michael Postan on economic history. Helen Cam’s course of lectures on medieval constitutional history was also an impressive performance. She was a great admirer of Stubbs but she also introduced us to the works of Maitland and we were made very much aware that there was a good deal of debate about such issues as the Magna Carta and the role of parliament. We also read Stubbs’s Charters as well as parts of his History.

Oakeshott’s lectures were intellectually exciting but it was in Postan’s lectures that we were made aware of what today we would call history from the bottom up, contrasting with the top down approach of most other lecturers. In his lectures on medieval economic history Postan emphasized the importance of such factors as population growth, price movements, and labor supply. It was in his lectures that I first heard Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society mentioned and George Homan’s Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, both of which I came to appreciate only after I had left Cambridge. Postan’s approach derived from his European background, his training as an economist, and his work as a graduate student at the London School of Economics where history was studied in the context of social science. Here he had been a junior colleague of R. H. Tawney and of Eileen Power (who became his wife). Curiously enough the London School of Economics was billeted at Peterhouse during the war but there was little contact between the two institutions. I did, however, hear a talk given by Tawney at Peterhouse after he had been made an honorary fellow of the College.

I also recall lectures given by J. H. Parry, later a professor at Harvard as part of a course on the Expansion of Europe. Parry was fascinated by such details as the lateen rig used by Muslim traders in the Indian Empire and the fore and aft rig of European vessels. He was also, more importantly, the author of The Spanish Theory of Empire and it was through this that I was introduced to the ideas of Las Casas, Victoria, and Sepulveda and the assumptions which lay behind Castilian imperialism. In contrast, other lectures on European history by Butterfield, Sir George Clark, the Regius Professor, and others seemed more commonplace. (It was said of Clark that he reduced the Scientific Revolution to the influence of a watchmaker in Leyden.) Needless to say it was assumed that English history was in no sense European. England had taken its own sonderweg.

It was possible to attend lectures in other disciplines and I took advantage of the opportunity to hear F. R. Leavis lecturing on poetry and on the novel. What I remember about the poetry lectures was his handing out sheets on which poems were printed without being attributed to an author. He then invited our comments about which we thought superior in terms of originality or use of language. This was my first contact with Cambridge Practical Criticism and it made a lasting impression. Leavis was an unpopular figure in some Cambridge academic circles but he took his role as a social and literary critic seriously and saw himself, along with his wife, as the spokesman of the true Cambridge tradition stretching back to Henry Sidgwick in the late nineteenth century. It was only later, after I had left Cambridge, that I had the chance to read Leavis’s journal Scrutiny at my leisure.

Lectures by and large were very much a passive form of education. It was in the collegiate supervisions based upon the presentation of a weekly essay that the student took on a more active role. My own supervisors were Brian Wormald, David Knowles, and Leonard Henry, a former housemaster at Harrow. Wormald, the college chaplain, was a somewhat withdrawn figure but it was thanks to him that I was encouraged to read articles in learned journals, such as those by Kosminsky in the Economic History Review and Postan himself in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. The tutorial essay gave me the opportunity to read current views on a particular topic and then to consider revisionist alternatives. Under Wormald’s guidance I read R. H. Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem of the Sixteenth Century and the works of George Unwin and Eileen Power. When I asked for a general reading list he recommended the works of A. D. Lindsay on modern democracy, G. H. Gooch on Nineteenth-century historians, Jacques Maritain’s True Humanism, and R. H. Tawney’s Equality—reflecting his own wide range of interests. He also brought Etienne Gilson’s book The Unity of Philosophical Experience to my attention. The tutorial system thus made it possible for students to discuss their work and wider matters with an established scholar.

My supervisor during my second year was Dom David Knowles, a former Benedictine monk and a very distinguished historian, whose book The Monastic Order in England was an outstanding contribution to medieval history. However, such scholars do not always make good teachers and my memory of Knowles is that he was more interested in his own work than in discussing my weekly essays. He had originally read classics and was not as familiar with the requirements of the History Tripos as Wormald had been. I do not recall him recommending specific articles in the historical journals, as Wormald had done.

During my third year I was supervised by a former history teacher at Harrow School, L. W. Henry, one of a number of additional supervisors recruited by the college to cope with the flood of ex-servicemen returning after 1945. Henry, a man in his sixties, was the most successful of my supervisors largely because of the fact that he showed great, (or apparently great) interest in my essays, taking notes as I read and raising points of criticism later. He also insisted that I read chapters from books in French, including as I recall Henri Hauser’s La Preponderance Espagnol. Under Henry’s guidance, I also read The Netherlands Divided by the Dutch historian Peter Geyl, and works on the French wars of religion, the Counter-reformation, and the controversies between the Jesuits and the Jansenists. I also recall reading Paul Hazard’s study of the early enlightenment, La Crise de la Conscience Européenne. It is thanks to Henry that I realized what a tutorial system can offer a committed student. In my later experience, however, seminars can work just as well and are of course much less costly in terms of manpower.

It remains to mention the Special Subject which was a key feature of the Historical Tripos. Third-year students were asked to choose a small number of topics which were offered by university lecturers. The key feature of such special subjects was the requirement that one read the sources and discuss them in one or two examination papers. In my third year the special subjects included a Tudor topic presented by Norman Sykes, professor of ecclesiastical history, and an eighteenth-century topic offered by Jack Plumb. My own choice was St. Francis and the Franciscan Order, which was given by David Knowles. This proved to be a most rewarding experience. The problems raised by the sources for the life of St. Francis paralleled those for the life of Christ and other religious figures in that the historian faced the challenge of recovering the original vision of Francis from material written at a later period.

The history of the Franciscan Order also showed how the founder’s idealism gave way to bureaucratic organization during a second generation. Knowles showed how architecture reflected these changes, for example, in the way in which Francis’s little chapel, the Portiuncula, was incorporated within the vast church of St. Maria del Angeli in Assisi. The grandiose building program of Brother Elias reflected in the Upper Church of Assisi illustrated a similar transition. Finally, there was the tension within the order between those who wished to recover the vision of the founder and those who sought accommodation with the world at large. Thus a key issue for Franciscans was their attitude to money. Francis himself refused to handle money but a later generation came to believe that it was lawful to have financial dealings through an interposed person (per interpositam personam). Still later, the order was bitterly divided over the millenarian ideas of Joachim of Flore. Knowles’s treatment of these topics was masterly in the way he brought out the lessons of more general history from the particularities of the Franciscan experience. I was also lucky enough later to receive a travel grant from the college to visit the sites about which we had read in the course.

Undergraduates at Cambridge were fortunate individuals. Most colleges were wealthy institutions and as a scholar of the college (from December 1942) I lived for two years in a comfortable set of rooms which were kept clean by a college servant (my gyp) and a female bedmaker. All meals were provided in the medieval college hall. Like other colleges, Peterhouse had its own library from which books could be borrowed and which in my recollection was open day and night. In addition there was a University History Library (the Seeley) and the University Library. There was thus every encouragement for bookish individuals such as myself to make good use of their time.

A student who had the advantage of using such facilities and the chance of hearing such lecturers as Oakeshott, Postan, Knowles, and Butterfield had little reason to complain. Looking back, however, I have often been struck by the limitations of some of the intellectual fare which we were offered. The Cambridge emphasis upon English constitutional history rested upon an evolutionary model which played down the role of conflict in history. It was also very much concerned with administrative institutions such as the medieval sheriff. From this approach specific individuals and local politics were missing. The approach was very much top down. It also failed to consider the role of class or the history of women. Above all, the uniqueness of English historical experience was emphasized, with the consequence that students were not encouraged to make comparisons. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were almost totally ignored. Differences between various parts of England were also lost sight of. In a word, the Whig Interpretation of History which Butterfield had criticized in 1931 was still very much alive. Indeed Butterfield himself in his wartime book The Englishman and His History (1944) had shown sympathy with Whig views.

Though I did not realize it in the 1940s, the History Tripos still bore the imprint of the founding fathers. History at Cambridge was a relatively new subject. The Historical Tripos was set up as recently as 1873 partly in response to the challenge posed by Oxford where the School of Modern History was already attracting about two hundred undergraduates a year. But what was the attraction of history? Part of the answer lay in the possibilities which it opened up for success in examinations for the Home and Indian Civil Service, as well as entry into other professions such as law or the established church. History soon came to rival Classics in popularity, although in the early years it was regarded as something of a soft option.

Sir John Seeley, who was Regius Professor when the Tripos was set up, looked upon history as a school of statesmanship, which should be linked with such disciplines as political philosophy, jurisprudence, and political economy. For him, as for Freeman, his Oxford counterpart, History was past politics and politics past history. The aim of history, in Seeley’s view, was to educate the political elite of the nation, an idea which had its origins in the belief of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Arnold, that the destinies of the nation should be in the hands of a highly educated clerisy.

But what was the nation? In a series of lectures published as a book, The Expansion of England (1884), Seeley expounded his view that the English nation was a greater England which included its English-speaking colonial possessions overseas. Seeley also regarded as English the Irish, the Scots, and the Welsh on the grounds that they shared the same language and religion (or so he thought). It was not surprising that Seeley should have opposed Irish Home Rule. In due course he became a leading figure within the circles of liberal imperialism. His statesmanship, far from being detached, was anti-Gladstone and anti-Parnell. Seeley’s concerns were very much with the relevance of history to the present day and for this reason he wished to maintain a place for political economy and international law in the History Tripos.

The Expansion of England may well have been published in response to those historians, led by George Prothero, who were pressing the case for English constitutional history in the Tripos. It was this group which first modified and then undermined the Seeley approach. Seeley himself thought that history has to do with the State and he criticized those historians who made too much of mere parliamentary wrangle and the agitation about liberty during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within the internal politics of the History Tripos, however, Seeley was defeated and victory went to those who wished to give English constitutional history a more prominent place. This created what J. B. Bury, the then Regius Professor, described in 1908 as a very unfortunate boom in English history, giving a certain note of insularity to the Tripos which was much to be deplored. For their part the constitutionalists argued that the subject was extremely valuable from the educational point of view because it represented a long historical evolution on the one hand and yet on the other was based upon charters and original documents so that students acquired some knowledge of the ways in which history was made.

In taking this line the constitutionalists turned their backs upon the influence of a colleague who was generally recognized as a historian of genius—Frederick William Maitland. Maitland’s vision was, in his own words, to produce, after due consideration of the undigested and scattered materials, a scientific and philosophical history of English law from the earliest times in all its bearings upon the economic, political, constitutional, social and religious life of the English people. He included women’s history within the scope of history. He was also well aware of the need to compare English developments with those in Western Europe. In 1897 when the Tripos was reformed Maitland thought the program was much too miscellaneous. Later generations of Cambridge historians always referred to Maitland with reverence as their founding father, but in fact it was the influence of Prothero and his associate J. R. Tanner which counted in the long run.

Looking back I would now argue that the Seeley and Prothero schools of thought each offered nationalist interpretations of English history, although they had differing views as to what constituted the English nation. Seeley’s brand of imperialism has now passed into history, although his Expansion of England is a remarkable piece of work, still worth reading. For all his insistence on the need to analyze the contemporary political scene, however, he failed to appreciate the power of Irish nationalism and its impact upon the empire. In contrast, Prothero’s equally nationalist emphasis upon uniqueness of English constitutional development proved to be longer lasting, at least in the Cambridge context.

Needless to say, undergraduates like myself were quite unaware of the prehistory of the History Tripos. Our historical awareness might have been alerted by being informed that the first chapter of Stubbs’s Constitutional History was no longer required reading. This was the chapter in which Stubbs traced the origins of English freedom to its origins in the German forests. We might have been asked to consider why a key assumption of Stubbs had been quietly jettisoned. However, we were merely grateful for the fact that our reading load had been reduced.

In his autobiography Interesting Times (2002), Eric Hobsbawn dismissed the Cambridge of his undergraduate years as a finishing school. I think this is too harsh a judgment. There is no doubt that history teaching at Cambridge as well as at Oxford was seen as a modern equivalent of the classical Greats in the sense of providing an appropriate higher education for products of those public schools who in due course would form part of an English ruling elite.¹ Those who reacted against it, apart from Eric Hobsbawm, included Victor Kiernan, author of The Lords of Human Kind, and Edward Thompson the brilliant historian of the English working class, both of them Cambridge graduates in the thirties.

In the contest between two nationalist versions of English history, victory by and large went to Prothero. In the 1940s the only relic of Seeley’s influence was a compulsory course on the history of political thought in Part I of the Tripos and an optional course on the Modern State in Part II. In contrast, the Prothero school’s emphasis on the use of documents was still strongly represented in the prominent place accorded to constitutional history in Part I and the Special Subject with its two papers in Part II. The place of constitutional history was to be reinforced when Geoffrey Elton arrived in Cambridge in the 1960s.

During my last year at Cambridge I was lucky enough to be awarded a French government scholarship to study medieval thought in Paris, sitting, I ventured to hope, at the feet of the well-known historian of ideas Etienne Gilson. I considered myself a medievalist and even had a topic related to the twelfth-century Renaissance. But job opportunities were few and far between. Knowles backed me for a research assistantship to Fritz Saxl of the Warburg Institute in London but Saxl died suddenly and I decided instead to apply for the post of assistant secretary at Manchester University Press. Like many other arts students, I had always thought of publishing as a possible career and had spent some weeks at Cambridge University Press during a summer vacation. When the job was offered to me I accepted it with alacrity. It was this which brought me to Manchester in August 1948.

Manchester University was a very different institution from Cambridge. Cambridge was a national university. Manchester prided itself on its local roots. Cambridge still had strong links with the established church. Dissenters, and other outsiders such as Jews and Catholics, were few and far between on its teaching body. It also drew heavily upon the foremost public (sc. private) schools for its undergraduates. Manchester had been founded in 1850 as Owens College, an institution like University College, London, open to all irrespective of belief, and its students by and large came from local grammar schools. Cambridge was situated in what was then a small market town whereas Manchester was a city which prided itself for its role in the Industrial Revolution. Manchester had given its name to the Manchester School of Free Trade, and it could boast a world famous newspaper, The Manchester Guardian, and a renowned orchestra, the Hallé, conducted by Sir John Barbarolli. Manchester was thus no mean city and its university and university press reflected this confidence, despite the depressing industrial surroundings.

The School of History at Manchester saw itself as fully the equal of Oxford or Cambridge. Adolphus Ward, who was familiar with modern German scholarship, had been professor there before coming to Peterhouse. In the person of Maurice Powicke Manchester had provided Oxford with its Regius Professor, and in L. B. Namier it boasted a leading historian whom many expected in due course to become Regius Professor. Since the days of T. F. Tout, a student of Stubbs and professor at Manchester from 1890 to 1925, the medievalists had close links with Oxford. Ernest Jacob was now Chichele Professor there, and C. R. Cheney, professor of medieval history at Manchester, had been a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. A. J. P. Taylor, then at Oxford, had been a lecturer at Manchester. Manchester historians regarded themselves as educating their students on more professional lines than was the case at Oxford or Cambridge, requiring honors students in history to write dissertations. An M.A. degree at Oxford and Cambridge could be bought for a fee three years after graduation as a B.A, whereas the M.A. at Manchester required a dissertation.

Namier’s influence in the History Department was striking. He had been professor there since 1931 and the younger historians in the department followed his lead in their Namierite approach to the history of parliament. John Roskell specialized in the membership of the later medieval parliament and Eric Robson in the role of parliament during the American Revolution. Donald Pennington wrote a Namierite study of the Long Parliament. Namier himself rejected ideas in history and regarded Edmund Burke as little more than a gentleman’s gentleman in the service of the Rockingham Whigs. This anti-ideas prejudice led to departmental antagonism toward Butterfield. When Butterfield published his George III, Lord North and the People in 1950, Namier encouraged his junior colleague Eric Robson to write a highly critical review, unsigned, in the Times Literary Supplement.

As well as enjoying a reputation for a Namierite approach to history and for excellence in medieval studies, the Manchester History Department had also made its mark in economic history. In particular it had pioneered the study of the Industrial Revolution, thanks especially to the work of T. S. Ashton. It could also claim as a founding father the historian George Unwin, whose work on the economic and social history of the later Middle Ages was recognized as being highly innovative. Mark Hovell, author of a classic study of the Chartist movement, had also been at Manchester. The History Department had also developed an interest in the local history of the Industrial Revolution and in later years one of its members, W. H. Chaloner, wrote a serious history of fish and chips, surely a symbol of history from the bottom up. Roy Fuller commemorated this in a poem

I.m. W.H. Chaloner ob.25.v.1987

Professor Chaloner linked the history

Of fish and chips to the cotton industry

My native town of Oldham especially.

This in the legendary final section

Of the work entitled Trends in Fish Consumption

Reached by students with sudden stupefaction.

Moreover, lived and died in that damp place,

Among green moors and roseate factories;

By then the deafening spindles more or less

Mere things historical, even (perhaps

According to his thesis) fish and chips,

Among vile dens of hamburgers and kebabs.

The Spectator, 25 June 1988

I was not a history student at Manchester, nor was I a member of the History Department. But in my role at the University Press I soon came to know most members of the History Department, although I only knew Namier by sight. As a result of these contacts I was asked to give a series of extramural classes on the Industrial Revolution, since the nominal tutor of the course was unwilling to venture outside his period. The Industrial Revolution was outside my period too but I was anxious to gain experience in university teaching and as a consequence found myself giving a small class at Weaverham, thirty miles from Manchester (a journey which involved catching a train home at midnight after waiting in a signalman’s cabin). At this time, I also wrote a review article discussing Herbert Butterfield’s Christianity and History (1950) which was published in The Downside Review. I sent him a copy of it partly to remind him of my existence. It may have been my casting my bread upon the waters in this manner which led to a surprise invitation to enter for a post at University College, Dublin.

While at Peterhouse I had got to know a research student named Desmond Williams who was reputed to know everybody and everything. His presence there was due to Herbert Butterfield who had been external examiner to the National University of Ireland, where he had met Williams and recognized his remarkable intellectual powers. As a consequence, Williams came over to Peterhouse as his research student in 1946 and eventually in 1949, with Butterfield’s backing, he was appointed, at the age of twenty-eight, to the newly vacant professorship of modern history at University College, Dublin. Williams had the support of Michael Tierney, the president of U.C.D., and with this behind him was in a position to expand the History Department by appointing assistant lecturers. The key proviso was that they should be Catholic, even though U.C.D. was in principle a secular institution. It was as a result of these informal comings and goings that I was asked to go for an interview in Dublin.

In September 1950 I became a member of the academic staff as an assistant in the History Department. I was without tenure and on a yearly contract but my superiors assured me that nobody was ever dismissed (this turned out to be not quite true, as John Whyte, an assistant in the Politics Department later found out to his cost). The institution I was joining was in many ways the equivalent of the University of Manchester in the sense that both were founded to cater for the needs of a group hitherto lacking full access to higher education. Manchester traced its origins back to Owens College in 1850. U.C.D. looked back to the Catholic University founded in the same year by John Henry Newman with the backing of the Catholic episcopate. At the time of their foundation both colleges were marginalized and impoverished institutions serving in the shadow of richer, well-established competitors—Oxford and Cambridge in the case of Manchester and Trinity College, Dublin in the case of U.C.D.

During the nineteenth century Trinity College had been very much an organ of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Catholics (and Presbyterians) could attend the college but the dominant ethos of the fellows remained Anglican and Unionist. By 1950, however, times had changed. The Irish Revolution of 1916–21 led to the overthrow of the Ascendancy and Trinity became the institution of an embattled minority. It was now the National University, of which U.C.D. was much the largest college, which spoke for the newly dominant Catholic majority. Paradoxically, the National University was a secular institution, its eventual foundation in 1908 having come about as a result of tortuous political negotiations between the Liberal government and the Catholic hierarchy. The hierarchy still met once a year to maintain the formal existence of Newman’s university. But in practice the only Catholic institution of university standing, in a formal sense, was St. Patrick’s College at Maynooth.

University College, Dublin was the most influential academic institution within the new Irish State. Perhaps inevitably, it was also a heavily politicized institution. It was in fact a stronghold of the Fine Gael party, which looked back for its origins to those who had accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The president of the college, Michael Tierney, a Fine Gael stalwart, had been a member of the (quasi-fascist) Blue Shirt movement in the 1930s. Two former historians within the college, Eoin Mac-Neill and John Marcus O’Sullivan, were also strongly Fine Gael (Tierney was in fact MacNeill’s son-in-law). The bitter divisions of the Irish Civil War left their mark upon the college. So also did the political history of the 1930s, when Fine Gael which had been in power during the 1920s was defeated at the polls by De Valera’s Fianna Fail party in 1932. In 1950 the college was in large measure an academic outpost of Fine Gael. Of the two parties Fianna Fail was supposedly more independent of the church, but a Dublin wit commented that whereas Fianna Fail genuflected in the presence of a Catholic bishop, Fine Gael prostrated themselves.

This complex situation in Ireland was made even more complicated by the fact that from 1920 to 1922 Ireland was partitioned between a twenty-six-county Irish Free State (from 1949 termed the Republic of Ireland) and a six-county unit of Northern Ireland which remained part of the United Kingdom. The practical effect of Partition in the south was to make the new state 90 percent Catholic. In the north the protestant majority saw itself as a besieged group within a largely Catholic island and as a consequence Queen’s University, Belfast, in theory secular, remained strongly Protestant and unionist in outlook.

Needless to say all this was as yet unknown to the young Englishman (as he saw himself) who arrived in Dublin in 1950. Indeed his anglocentric historical education at Cambridge acted as a barrier to understanding. Within the evolutionary framework of the English Whig interpretation of History there was no place for the revolutions and paradoxes of Irish history. Seeley’s alternative imperial view of English history might have provided a basis for a colonial interpretation of Anglo-Irish relations. Seeley himself referred to the treatment of French Canada in 1867 as a success for English policy, but the parallels between this and the Irish situation escaped him.

As a Fine Gael-dominated institution the college could expect no favors from the Fianna Fail party and when in power De Valera (1932–48, 1951–54, 1957–59) was rumored to favour Trinity. In the eyes of the History Department, however, the chief threat to their independence came not from the politicians but from the Catholic Church. Within the new state the Church was wholly dominant in the sphere of primary and secondary education (except for Protestant schools). It was also extremely influential within the National University. At University College, Galway, the local bishop, Michael Browne, was a controlling figure. At University College, Cork, Alfred O’Rahilly, polymath and Catholic zealot, was president. At University College, Dublin, however, Michael Tierney, though in some ways an ultra-Catholic, managed to keep the archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, at arm’s length, in one instance resisting his attempts to have crucifixes placed on the walls of the lecture rooms. Nevertheless the clergy exercised considerable influence, thanks to the fact that certain sensitive departments, those of ethics, politics, metaphysics, and psychology, were regarded as falling within the Church’s sphere. History was also a possible candidate for inclusion under this rubric and in fact of the four history professors two were Jesuit priests. One of them, Fr. John Ryan S. J., who held the chair of early Irish history, chose to remain outside the History Department. The two lay professors could count on the general support of Fr. Aubrey Gwynn, S.J., professor of medieval history, but in a crisis he could hardly be expected to resist strong pressure from the Archbishop’s House. (As an indication of the tone of these years it may be mentioned that Fr. Gwynn was unable to attend his own father’s funeral on the grounds that it was a Protestant service!)

The influence of the Church partly rested on the fact that within the archdiocese of Dublin there were a number of seminaries whose students attended courses at University College. The largest of these was the diocesan seminary at Clonliffe, north of the Liffey, whose students used to march in crocodile formation wearing bowler hats through the streets of north Dublin on their way to Earlsfort Terrace. Other seminaries included those of the Vincentians, the Marists, and the Jesuits. The archbishop himself was a member of the Holy Ghost Order, whose seminary was at Kimmage, a suburb of south Dublin, where students were exposed to the lectures of a certain Fr. Fahey. Fahey’s book Christ in the Modern World blamed Freemasons for the spread of immorality and unbelief and thus equipped Holy Ghost students with their order’s own interpretation of history if and when they became history students at U.C.D. The Holy Ghost interpretation of modern history in fact reflected the experience of the order during the French Third Republic when they and other orders faced the threat of anticlericalism. The French Revolution itself was seen as a Masonic conspiracy aiming to undermine the Church, a view which enjoyed papal backing. History essays produced by Holy Ghost students at U.C.D. regularly reproduced such monocausal views, presenting the History Department with a challenge as to what should be the appropriate response.

The Church also gave its backing to what in some ways was the equivalent of the Whig interpretation of history with an Irish twist. On this view the Church represented the Irish nation in its struggle through centuries of persecution. The period of the penal laws in the eighteenth century was seen as one in which the alliance between priest and people was forged in a spirit of Faith and Fatherland, leading in the nineteenth century to a resurgence by the Church under the leadership of such figures as Daniel O’Connell and Cardinal Cullen.

But the Church was not the only source of anxiety. Another challenge to the History Department was that provided by the Fenian view of history, with which the Fianna Fail party sympathized. From this standpoint the true Irish political tradition was that exemplified by the revolutionary outlook of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and Patrick Pearse. There was no Fenian equivalent of the Catholic seminaries, but within the National (that is, primary) schools, Notes for Teachers: History (1933) formed the basis of a Fenian-style curriculum. On this view of Irish history the Irish people were seen as resisting their English conquerors in every generation. The Christian Brothers in their secondary schools also sponsored this interpretation. The majority of history students entering University College had thus been exposed to nationalist interpretations of one form or another and the newly established History Department saw its role as that of engaging them in critical debate.

The History Department itself was something of a broad church, covering various political viewpoints. Desmond Williams himself, professor of modern European history, had strong Fine Gael connections. Conservative politically, he had got to know Michael Oakeshott well while at Cambridge and had actually helped to establish The Cambridge Journal which Oakeshott edited. As a Catholic his sympathies were liberal. One of his historical interests was the figure of Cardinal Morone who had shown himself to be supportive of compromise with the Lutherans during the Council of Trent. Desmond also admired Lord Acton and seems to have sympathized with his dilemmas during the Vatican Council of 1870. (I remember Desmond once discussing the decree concerning papal infallibility and explaining its ambiguity.)

Aubrey Gwynn, professor of medieval history, was also an interesting figure. Smith O’Brien, the aristocratic rebel of 1848, was his grandfather. His father was Stephen Gwynn, a well-known writer and journalist and Home Rule party M.P. The Gwynns, a Protestant family, had long-standing links with Trinity College but Aubrey had converted to Catholicism at the age of twelve and as a Jesuit novice had gone to the Royal University, precursor of U.C.D. Michael Tierney, later to be professor of Greek, was a fellow student of his, who never forgot coming second to Aubrey in the final exams.

The third member of the triumvirate, Robin Dudley Edwards, professor of modern Irish history, came from a very different background. Son of an English father, he had attended Patrick Pearse’s school, St. Enda’s, possibly at the urging of his maternal grandmother, who had strong republican views. Dudley had good friends on the Fianna Fail side of the political divide and shared with them a certain anticlericalism. He was always suspicious of Aubrey Gwynn. Dudley also knew Irish well, a fact which helped to placate those who thought the History Department was too anglophile.

Despite the contrast in their personalities and their differing views on many matters, Williams, Gwynn, and Edwards had come together in a united History Department to advance the cause of what they saw as a more critical view of Irish history. They were the advocates of a liberalism which dared not speak its name in a narrow world dominated